Finding high-paying SEO and web marketing clients should be easy. After all, SEO experts everywhere are supposedly swamped with business. So why aren’t you? The truth is, many SEO experts actively seek new business. While they put on great airs about attracting business the reality is they either personally prospect for new clients, hire telemarketers, or use inside or outside sales reps to prospect for them. This isn’t to suggest their skills are lacking. The problem is the huge amount of competition. Just go to Google and type in “SEO” and you will uncover about 251,000,000 competing indexed pages. If an SEO expert were to just sit back waiting for business they’d starve to death. Established SEO experts have huge marketing budgets to work with. Tens of thousands of dollars to market their services. Just go to Google’s traffic estimator and check on the words ‘Search engine optimization’. Right now the estimated average cost per click is $6.38 to $8.73, per click, with an estimated 215 to 271 clicks per day. Do the math. Even on the low side that’s $1371.70 per day, $ 41,151.00 per month you’d have to pay just to compete.

And there’s no guarantee those who click will hire you. You could end up just throwing money away. Obviously, all but well established SEO experts and deep-pocket corporations can compete in that arena. If you want to sell your online skills to other businesses I recommend a different approach. Go offline. I don’t mean just go out and randomly pound the pavement as some ‘gurus’ would have us believe. I mean do some research of local businesses in your own community, then go out selling your services. Why offline? Because there is more money flowing in most USA cities than in many entire countries. And because most local competing companies have decided either consciously or subconsciously decided to completely overlook local SEO marketing. Ever since the world wide web came into existence, people have had the crazy notion they can sell to anyone anywhere and at any time. The dotcom crash proved that’s untrue.

Still though, in every community companies continue to ‘pooh pooh’ local markets. They are overlooking easy opportunities. But that usually means their competitors are overlooking those opportunities too. That’ spells opportunity for you. Selling local SEO and web marketing services to these businesses is easier than chasing national companies and way cheaper than trying to compete in the pay-per-click arena. In most cases, there’s little to no expense to market your services locally. You simply need a track record that you can do what you claim, and you need potential clients to speak with. I’m assuming since you are reading this article you already have the necessary web marketing and SEO skills to do as you promise. So lets address how to get clients. First thing I’d suggest is grab as many web address of local businesses as you can get your hands on. Visit the local Chamber of Commerce web site, grab local newspapers, and take out the big fat Yellow Pages directory that is in some corner collecting dust. Thumb through each of these to find web addresses of local businesses. Collect as many as you can.

Next go to their website and look for the keywords they are using in their meta tags. This will tell you one of two things. The first is, you will learn what words and phrases are important to the business. Or else what words and phrases their IT guy or gal thought were important to paste into the meta tags. Next go to Google. Type in the url, name of your city, and one keyword or phrase from the site. This will show you how well the company is ranked for this keyword in their local market. Yes, I bet you already knew that. But just in case I figured I’d better mention it. Next, do the same thing with each keyword in their meta tags. You are looking for words that are good match for what they do but poorly ranked locally. Those are your ‘golden’ opportunities for selling your SEO services. Obviously though, if the site is ranked will in the local market you’d want to toss this record and move to checking for opportunities with a different company. Of course this process will take some time. Especially if you have hundreds of businesses in your local community, as most do. This won’t take just a few hours, it would take weeks to process by hand.

The good thing though is it won’t cost any direct out of pocket money. Then again, if you believe time is money, then checking a bunch of sites by hand is a poor choice. Automate the process. Use software to do the searching and ranking for you. Or outsource to one of the very cheap freelance-type sites where people will do the most painfully redundant work (like checking and ranking meta tags) for low wages. Either way, whether you choose to do the work yourself by hand, outsource, or use software you’ll be able to get local clients without the hassles of spending tens of thousands of dollars each month just to compete with other SEO experts who claim they are sitting back just watching money roll in.

Most small businesses have a small web presence but there are a lot of customers in their surrounding area that utilize the internet when finding local shops and services. Internet marketing has become the way of reaching these potential clients in their communities through social networking, the Google Local Business Center and search engine optimization.

Why Internet Marketing is the Best Local Advertising?

easier for customers to find your company up to date contact information more useful and widely used than yellow pages out of town visitors can find you quickly cheaper and more effective

When deciding to start optimizing within the Google local business listings it is important to consider consulting someone within search engine marketing industry. Most likely a local SEO company can offer search engine optimization services from an expert that is cheaper than spending the time to learn and execute a strategic internet marketing plan on your own.

A company whose web presence places them at the top of the Google local business listings knows that only a first page placement will get them high quality customer traffic. Small businesses that already have a web presence and show up on the local listings within Google maps and other search engines should consider their listing position when deciding to keep optimizing in house. SEO experts can have a small business listing to the first page within a month and as little as two weeks.

So whether you’re already doing local advertising through internet marketing or wanted to get started, consider utilizing an SEO company with an search engine marketing expert that can get you to the top of the local business listings quickly and maintain your web presence. Optimization is a never ending process with more companies competing for that top position every day it makes it harder and harder to keep up.

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